Silvestre de Sacy

Antoine Isaac, Baron Silvestre de Sacy
Antoine Isaac, Baron Silvestre de Sacy
Born	21 September 1758 Paris, France
Died	21 February 1838 (aged 80) Paris, France
Occupation	French Linguist, Orientalist, Councillor

Antoine Isaac, Baron Silvestre de Sacy (French: [sasi]; 21 September 1758 – 21 February 1838), was a French nobleman, linguist and orientalist. His son, Ustazade Silvestre de Sacy, became a journalist.

Silvestre de Sacy was born in Paris to a notary named Jacques Abraham Silvestre, a Jansenist. He was born into a middle-class Jewish family. The surname extension of "de Sacy" was added by the younger son after a fashion then common with the Parisian bourgeoisie. Sacy's father died when he was seven years old, and he was educated on his own by his mother.

In 1781 he was appointed councillor in the cour des monnaies, and was advanced in 1791 to be a commissary-general in the same department. Having successively studied Semitic languages, he began to make a name as an orientalist, and between 1787–91 worked on the Pahlavi inscriptions of the Sassanid kings. In 1792 he retired from public service, and lived in close seclusion in a cottage near Paris till in 1795 he became professor of Arabic in the newly founded school of living Eastern languages (École speciale des langues orientales vivantes).

During this interval Sacy studied the religion of the Druze, the subject of his last and unfinished work, the Exposé de la religion des Druzes (2 vols., 1838). He published the following Arabic textbooks:

In 1806 he added the duties of Persian professor to his old chair, and from this time onwards his life was one of increasing honour and success, broken only by a brief period of retreat during the Hundred Days.